Greenland's early Viking settlers were subjected to rapidly changing climate. Temperatures plunged several degrees in a span of decades, according to research from Brown University. A reconstruction of 5,600 years of climate history from lakes near the Norse settlement in western Greenland also shows how climate affected the Dorset and Saqqaq cultures. Results appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University]  The end of the Norse settlements on Greenland likely will remain shrouded in mystery. While there is scant written evidence of the colonys demise in the 14th and early 15th centuries, archaeological remains can fill some of the blanks, but not all.

What climate scientists have been able to ascertain is that an extended cold snap, called the Little Ice Age, gripped Greenland beginning in the 1400s. This has been cited as a major cause of the Norses disappearance. Now researchers led by Brown University show the climate turned colder in an earlier span of several decades, setting in motion the end of the Greenland Norse. Their findings appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Brown scientists finding comes from the first reconstruction of 5,600 years of climate history from two lakes in Kangerlussuaq, near the Norse Western Settlement. Unlike ice cores taken from the Greenland ice sheet hundreds of miles inland, the new lake core measurements reflect air temperatures where the Vikings lived, as well as those experienced by the Saqqaq and the Dorset, Stone Age cultures that preceded them.

What I fail to understand is why so-called intelligent researchers can conclude there were natural and sometimes severe variations in climate the past 2000 years and yet not recognize that the same variations may be naturally occurring today. Yet, they persist in saying humans are responsible for global warming/climate change that may be seen in recent years.

With all due respect to Brown University, the fate of the Norse settlements in Greenland and the role of climate change in their demise has been documented by Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad (The Viking Discovery of America, Checkmark Books, New York 2001). No doubt also by others. I recall reading, somewhere, that the last wedding ceremony peformed in the Norse church on Greenland occurred on a date somewhat earlier than Columbus’ 1492 voyage of exploration.

Tomorrow, the county where I live will set a new record for days in a row without breaking the 70 degree mark if the temperatures do not warm up in the next ten days. We are now at 245 days of below 70 degree weather. From the looks of the forecast, we’re on track for that record, we’ll be lucky to break 60 degrees. For the most part, Alaska has had warmer temperatures this spring than Whatcom County, WA.

This is on a par with discovering that the sun gives us daylight. I hope you have a link backing up this claim.

I've studied this for years and have concluded that its my wife's alarm clock that gives us light. That thing goes off and within minutes I have to roll over and put a pillow over my head because its so bright. It also gets much noisier almost immediately. People screaming "Where's my books?", "Get out of the bathroom!" , etc.

Tonight as an experiment I'm going to unplug the thing and yank the backup battery and prove that I'm right.

A new study suggests that some Icelanders may be direct descendants of a Native American woman. If this is true, then the Vikings in fact had substantive contact with Native Americans, an unestablished hypothesis until now, and were the first people to bring a Native American to Europe.

The Vikings settled Iceland in the 9th century, and it is now a country of a little fewer than 300,000 people. Since that time, the Icelandic gene pool has remained largely homogenous as a result of long-term isolation. That, combined with Icelands meticulous record keeping of its peoples genealogy, makes studying and verifying Icelanders genetic make-up an alluring draw to researchers interested in genetic studies.

One such researcher recently published a study in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, analyzing the DNA of Icelanders to determine that a mysterious . . . . DNA sequence (that we name the C1e lineage). . . , carried by more than 80 Icelanders, can be traced through the female line to four ancestors born in Iceland around 1700. There is good reason to believe that the C1e lineage arrived in Iceland several hundreds of years before 1700.

The C1e lineage can be found in both Native Americans and East Asian populations. However, it is more than likely that the C1e lineage found in Icelanders is linked to Native Americans and that this link was created as far back as the year 1000 A.D. when the Vikings settled in Newfoundland.

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